I’m not here to argue or “nit-pick,” however skills are not talents.

Skills – plural of skill (Noun)

Talents – plural of tal·ent (Noun)

Without getting too deep into the explanation of this, allow me to relate what we’ve found out about the human brain. To begin with, 90% of what we currently know about how the human brain works has been learned in the past 13 years – Nat’l Institute of Mental Health

• At birth our brains contain one hundred billion neurons. (100,000,000,000)
• By our third birthday we have fifteen thousand synaptic connections coming from each of those one hundred billion neurons.
• By our teens we have reduced this number to almost half of the original number
• Our axiological filters (I,E, and S) help determine which networks get reduced and which get reinforced

We “self-select” how we interrupt the enormous and never ending stream of information coming into our brains.  We become “hard-wired” so to speak in how we make the decisions we make.  This all occurs early in life and although it can be “changed” it only occurs with a lot of effort and at the speed of a glacier.

Let’s take a look at what we’re calling Natural Talents – your innate ability to do something, your natural endowment or aptitude.  Key word here is natural.  These talents can be physical, as in Michael Phelps’ physical attributes (particularly suited to swimming: his long, thin torso offers low drag; his arms span 6 feet 7 inches (201 cm)—disproportionate to his height of 6 feet 4 inches (193 cm)—and act as long, propulsive “paddles”; his relatively short legs lower drag, and perhaps add the speed enhancement of a hydrofoil; his size 14 feet provide the effect of flippers; and his hypermobile ankles can extend beyond the pointe of a ballet dancer, enabling him to whip his feet as if they were fins for maximum thrust through the water) or they can be mental as in Anthony Robbins’ ability to speak and engage people through words (a mental talent due to his high empathetic ability.)  The natural talents I’m concerned with in this article are only those (mental) talents we all possess.  Natural (mental) talents are patterns of thinking and decision-making that you were either born with or that you developed very early in life.

Based on your genetics and the way your brain is structured, you are naturally good at seeing certain things, while you may be completely blind to others. Many people make a simple mistake … they assume that natural talents can be developed through learning, training and hard work.  They fail to appreciate just how fixed the neural networks that control these talents really are.  Instead, because they fail to differentiate between talents and skills, and because they assume that both can be acquired equally, they set about identifying what talents and skills they need for a given role and then start trying to develop them both.  When they do this, they are only partly successful.  They may manage to develop new skills, but they don’t develop new talents.  They don’t change the neural networks that control natural thinking talents.  In so doing, they may indeed become one of the most knowledgeable sales people in the company, but they still don’t think like the great sales people.

People exert a tremendous amount of energy attempting to change themselves in a way that just isn’t going to lead to success, when in reality it is the outside world that needs to be changed.  That’s what geniuses do; they change the world in which their natural talents play.

RESULTS OF A STUDY

Initially the study set out to try to identify what if anything did the successful leaders in numerous industries possess that the others didn’t?  It was assumed they’d find four categories of people – below average, average, above average and excellent.  During the study it became apparent that another level existed – Genius Level performance.  This is not referring to a person’s IQ; it is all about how a person performs due to his or her own natural talents.  Those who were identified as “genius level performers” didn’t posses any specific natural thinking talents that were missing in the rest.  What was discovered were two acquired skills and these two skills were present in all of the Genius level performers, and quite absent in those who weren’t.  The acquired skills are self-awareness and authenticity

From a purely statistical perspective, the correlations between self-awareness, authenticity and performance are significant:

• Average level of self-awareness for the genius level performers in the study was 89%, compared to 62% for excellent and less than 47% for below ave, ave, above ave.
• Average level of authenticity for genius level performers was 91%, compared to 79% for excellent and 63% or less for below ave, ave, above ave.

These differences make a compelling argument for becoming more self-aware and authentic. The first step in the process is to discover what your talents are and that is being offered in the complimentary ADVanced Insights Assessment tool.  We identify 78 such natural talents in our Attribute Index and rank order them for you from talent to non-talent. Return to the previous page and click on the AWARE link.